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Welcome to rachelsays... The blog of Rachel Lewis, containing my thoughts and musings on illustration, design, fashion, music, cakey-bakey goodness, culture and things that I generally find cool. There's also a good chance my own illustration work will pop up on here.

All work on this blog is copyright to me unless I state that it isn't. Obviously. Don't do stealing, kids.

So come on in, have a look around, and leave a comment if you like what you see.

www.rachelsayshello.com
contact [at] rachelsayshello.com

Showing posts with label Ink. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ink. Show all posts

Friday, December 04, 2009

Naja Conrad-Hansen: Designer and Artist from Copenhagen

I've just come across Naja Conrad-Hansen's work in the latest issue of Varoom! Magazine and have to share it. She's so talented and her work is beautiful, edgy, with a hint of darkness and horror, firmly rooted in fashion.


"Graduating from Danmarks Design School in 2003 with a Ma in Visual communication and a background in fine art; she started her profession as a freelance designer and artist in 2003. Her practice embraces illustration, painting, graphic design, art direction, and making silk-screen prints + definitely more. Inspirations comes equally from the worlds of fashion, hardcore music, and traditional art and design and in general observing the world around her. The illustration style is basically about "finding some untouched areas of the mind and stimulating the eye and imagination. Naja Conrad-Hansen has worked on projects ranging from Max Mara to the solid perfume Filth, as well as an award-winning children book. Her works have been included in a wide variety of fashion/graphic magazines and books. She also designs print and pattern design for different clothing labels including limited edition print for her own brand Meannorth."










I love ink work and the selective use of colour works very well. Her figures have that similar distorted feel like Julie Verhoeven's fashion figures do, and there's so much energy. Also I love how she uses text as well, that always goes down well with me. I would love to be able to create work on a level like this. This is another example of an artist who inspires and makes you depressed at the same time. Take a look at her portfolio site, Mean North, there's tonnes to wade through.

All this work posted is copyright to Naja Conrad-Hansen.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

The Daily Ampersand Project: Day 7 to 10

I've been massively busy (which isn't really an excuse) so haven't posted any of my ampersands! I'm about 2 weeks behind on posting and 4 days behind on actually doing them. Should finish more later.

The main trouble is scanning them in - I'm being lazy mostly because I haven't set up my scanner on my shiny super mac yet so have to use the parent's, then send the files to myself, bla di bla, lazy lazy.

So here's 4 days worth in one! Day 7 to 10.



Day 7's ampersand was 'Silom' (anybody ever used that? Bit weird innit) but it was perfect for another cut out, as you can see from the immensely bad quality of that picture there. My hand looks fat. I'm going on a hand diet. The pattern behind is day 8's ampersand, read on....

Day 8 is Monotype Corsiva, a lovely typeface that I use lovingly whenever I'm spreading love. It's ampersand is particularly nice. Looks like an R and a T, strangely. So I sort of broke my own rule here (no computers), but I just had to, I'd literally just acquired my amazing new iMac (so new I got it the first day it came out, booya!) and kind of HAD to use my spangly, wonderful, legal copy of the full CS4 suite. So out came illustrator and I made this pattern, then traced it in biro. Red biro - I know, I'm so pioneering. I want to make a huge pattern of this though. It's nice.


Aha, this elegant thing is 'Little Lord Fontleroy' (I know, right), found on trusty dafont.com, reproduced in good ol' blue ink for Day 9. With it's amazing ink smell. I don't rate all the letterforms in this font, but this ampersand is sweet as. Looks like a treble clef! (I just had to wikipedia that, couldn't for the life of me remember what the damn thing was called. This is why I never passed a single violin grade.) And so if you think about it, treble clefs look a lot like ampersands. Interesting. Wonder what their love child would look like.


See if you can guess what Day 10 was. It couldn't really not make an appearance, could it. It is, of course, Helvetica, hand stitched in pink thread. Helvetica's ampersand would destroy Arial's ampersand in a fight, if I made them fight. Arial is all unbalanced. Some would say criminally insane.

Ok I'm going to try and catch up properly in the next few days.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

The Daily Ampersand Project: Day 4


Today's ampersand is Georgia - my favourite typeface, incidentally. I wanted to get a bit messy today so I got the black ink out.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

New editorial illustration

It's a new year and so new work. Loads of it in fact, I think I've taken on too much. But more on that later I think.

For one of my modules, I am illustrating 2 book covers (one for the Penguin Design Award, The Secret History) and also doing 6 editorial illustrations. I'm focusing the editorials on environmental/ethical articles, and I found a great one this week. Here is the link to it online. It's about how many perfumes aren't that environmentally safe etc.

The idea for the illustration came to me as soon as I read the article, didn't really have to brainstorm a lot; I love when that happens. So I was able to do this in a few hours, which is ace as I need the practice to do editorials really fast like this.


I might change a few bits and pieces (i think the lil icons are too small, this is only going to max 10cm big when printed) but there it is.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Seven Deadly Sins: Finished Project

I never actually thought I would be able to finish this in time for deadline. This project has been so stressful; fun though. And even though I had to rush these a bit, I'm really pleased with them. Here we go:








I won't put the titles up; one of the ideas of the project was to create a sense of ambiguity with the sins; I know some are more obvious than others. I was looking at perception and the way text can influence an image, so I suppose it's interesting if people have their own perceptions of which Sin each image represents. My three favourites are Pride, Sloth and Envy; they definitely came out the best.

I also want to upload this image as well, it's my favourite drawing from the project. I've noticed I have actually improved over these past 12 weeks. It works quite well as a piece on it's own:


I handed in today; such an amazing feeling. Now I can have a bit of a relax over Christmas, while I start applying for my MA. Scary stuff.

I'll post my finished magazine next...

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Illustration Friday Night: The Dead

This is my first post for Illustration Friday Night. The theme is The Dead, and I had lots of fun doing this one:


Click for larger image.... it looks better that way.
Yeah, This is not natural...
A bunch of holes where the dead used to be, underground
Forget supernatural...
'cause all those resting in peace, are out and walking the streets
With no heartbeat

It was inspired by the lyrics for 'Wake The Dead' by The Used, off their album Lies for the Liars. It's such a good song. You can find the entire lyrics here. This piece was done entirely with black and red ink. It felt so good to use ink again, I really like it. Except I bought a new calligraphy pen and it's rubbish.. unless you use hardly any pressure then no ink comes out. I'll go buy a new one tomorrow.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Say hello to BerryFace

So I ended up emailing Keaton, asking about his work and things, and he gave me some very good advice:

"just keep painting and drawing exactly what you want to look at and it should be personal to you and therefore bare some kind of mark, but besides, being versatile is great in illustration."
Apart from the awful grammar (teehee), it's very true. I'm constantly worried about my style, or lack of it, and keep focussing on what I think I should be doing, instead of just drawing what I like, for the hell of it, whenever I want.

So I've been day dreaming about all these pieces I want to do, and most involve ink actually. I haven't used ink for a while but I love it, and I think I want to start using it more often. It's the process that I enjoy more than the outcome usually (most of the time it's just a mess, but getting messy is so fun).
So with that in mind, I did a recent Drawanyway task, where you had to simply draw the view through a door. Then I decided to go over it in ink, hurrah:























So there you go. Lots of fun :)
Another uber fun thing, as you have probably noticed, is my new Doll-Doll! She is called BerryFace and she likes you a lot, especially if you feed her easter eggs ^.^ Look after her.
Another thing I wanted to point out is my friend Elly's art blog - Needle Blossom Shed. It is posted under my "Blogs I like" section, but everyone should take a look at this post. Basically, it's awesome. Oh how I love collage!

That's something else I need to get back into as well. Argh. You see my problem?